Short stories are much easier to teach than unseen pieces. I remember an article that we read, which criticized the use of unseen passages in assessing literary knowledge, because it re-affirmed a "piecemeal" knowledge of the text (I remember the word "piecemeal" being used). Short stories are a veritable contrast, because they have a beginning and end; the criticism that we level at it will thus be more valid than the kind of ideas that we criticise in a text extract.
So far, the kinds of classroom techniques that we've gone through in class are all fine and dandy; they are easy to carry out, as long as the teacher is sound of mind and able to come to class with ideas and criticism all in hand before the lesson is carried out. It would be more interesting to come up with lessons that involved students creating their own artifacts, though such lessons would clearly require more time.
Short stories, for example, would be great for students to create short films. This could be done in upper secondary classes, where class sizes are smaller and hence more amenable to the kind of guidance that the teacher can provide in this sort of project. Lower secondary classes would be harder to manage.
Definitely a way for students to "translate" - perhaps to do storyboards to decide what is important in the film versus in the short story. That might be manageable for a lower seconddary class.
ReplyDeleteWith regard to students creating their own artifacts, definitely that's interesting, but require the teacher to think through and work out well so that the learning is maxed out. Learning can be in stages and the final artifact can be a combination of different lessons as well.
I've never liked storyboards, because I can't draw, and I anticipate that many students can't as well. Given the number of cartooning sites that make such the process accessible to the amateur, it might feasible, more so than I originally thought.
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